drupal

I gave a talk tonight on node.js, and related technologies, to the Vancouver Drupal Users Group. The talk ran through why node.js is useful for realtime web apps, how to get it and Express up and running, and how to access data from Drupal and MongoDB.

I made a simple class that provides a simple SQLite-based persistant FIFO stack class for PHP 5 (similar conceptually to Stack::Persistent in Perl).

A number of times I've written Drupal scripts that run out of memory while trying to process large amounts of nodes (changing taxonomy, etc.). Adding them to a persistant stack, then doing them in batches, is an easy way to remedy this.

According to Drupal usage stats, over 40 sites are using the Multiforms survey/contest module I developed with the help of Geoff Burke and Miles Kier. That's not a huge number, but will motivate me to clean up the code and improve the documentation. I've definitely learned a lot about Drupal, and development in general, since I started the project a year and a half ago.

The Django databrowse application is an interesting piece of software that I've wanted to try out ever since its creator, Adrian Holovaty, demoed it in Vancouver last year. Its purpose is to allow you to navigate data, using a web interface, looking for trends and other interesting aspects.